Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The answer to Problem 1022 is no. For every there is a finite -uniform hypergraph with no proper two-coloring such that every vertex set contains at most edges of . Its edges have size at least , and for and nonempty the count is below , so any constant for which the problem's implication holds satisfies , and no such sequence tends to infinity.
The construction has two levels over a ground set of vertices. For every ordered pair of -subsets of a new vertex is added with the two edges and ; then, with the set of these new vertices, for every -subset of and every -subset of a vertex is added with the edges and . A two-coloring with no monochromatic edge cannot give both colors to vertices of , so one color covers a -set ; every partition of into two -sets forces the opposite color on a vertex of , and such vertices form a set whose edge with a -subset of cannot be colored. Mapping each edge to the new vertex it was built with sends every edge to one of its own vertices and at most two edges to any vertex, which gives the count. The rewritten proof on the source card records the construction with its notation made literal.
Claimant. The forum user KoishiChan, who posted the construction in the problem's discussion thread on 4 December 2025 as a comment and not as a dated manuscript; the comment claimed , and the correction to is recorded below. Wood's 2013 preprint, which KoishiChan pointed out in the same thread on 24 January 2026, is a different hypergraph and has its own claim page.
Acceptance. Terence Tao replied in the thread on 4 December 2025 that the
argument looked essentially correct to Tao; ChatGPT Pro, which Tao ran on it,
corrected to for the construction; the site's curator, Thomas
Bloom, wrote on 23 January 2026 that Bloom would mark the problem solved by
KoishiChan; the site marks the problem settled, under the label PROVED (LEAN),
and its commentary says the statement is false and credits the counterexample
(reviewed). The label's polarity is the reverse of the outcome, and the
problem page records that. There is no manuscript and no refereed publication.
Formalization. The Lean file among the links, in Boris Alexeev's
repository lean-proofs, declares itself a formalization of a solution to
Problem 1022, naming KoishiChan as its informal author and Aristotle and Boris
Alexeev as its formal authors; it states the problem's existential as
erdos_1022 and proves its negation not_erdos_1022 through the lemma
c_t_le_two. Alexeev announced it in the thread on 22 January 2026, and Tao
recorded it there as a formalization of KoishiChan's solution. The link is
pinned to the repository's commit of 24 August 2026, the file's latest
revision as of 2026-10-07. This corpus has not built it, so the formalization
is a link and not formalized evidence. The formal-conjectures
statement file for the problem records the negative answer and points at the
same file; a statement file is not a formalization.